Where the name comes from
Most modern Ding families trace themselves to Duke Ding of Qi, whose descendants adopted his posthumous title 丁 as their clan name; the traditional homeland is supposedly northwest of Dingtao in Shandong. A separate line descends from Duke Ding of Song in the Spring and Autumn period, and in the Three Kingdoms period a general of Wu was ordered by Sun Quan to change his surname to Ding as a punishment. The earliest recorded bearer is the Duke of Ding of the Shang dynasty.
The same name, spelled differently
A Chinese surname is a character, not a spelling. The Latin letters on a passport come from whichever dialect the name was written down from — so these are all 丁.
- DingMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- TingTaiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines (e.g. Nobel physicist Samuel C. C. Ting, 丁肇中)
- Đinh (Dinh)Vietnamese
- Jeong / ChungKorean
The character
Outside a name, 丁 is an ordinary word meaning fourth of the ten Heavenly Stems 十天干[shí tiān gān].
- Strokes
- 2
- Radical
- 一